


WOLVES WITHOUT TEETH

by whitesilverandmercury



Category: Starfighter (Comic)
Genre: Biting, Blood, M/M, NSFW, Reference to Underage Sex, Sex, accidental fluff, character exploration, dark themes, did i mention headcanon, flashback headcanons, i can write fluff?????, pretty gritty stuff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-05
Updated: 2015-12-05
Packaged: 2018-05-05 00:51:32
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,522
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5354648
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/whitesilverandmercury/pseuds/whitesilverandmercury
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>i. He learned from his mother how to hold a grim, narrowed-eyes stare, and he practiced when his father was lecturing him. ii. Abel mutters, “Oh my God.” He rolls his eyes and flops back to his pillow. It’s his way of flirting. iii. “He’s a sputnik,” Vasily Davidovich said and the others in the bar echoed with growly laughter, blowing smoke in his face and waving him to refill their whiskeys. iv. Cain uses his hands—his tongue—his teeth—jumps his bones because he doesn’t want to talk about something or because he doesn’t have the words to talk about something.</p>
            </blockquote>





	WOLVES WITHOUT TEETH

_Earth._

“Ethan!”

        There were men in the formal dining room his father needed to impress. Not for his position—just for himself. He was always needing to impress and be impressed. His father’s assistant caught him at the door to the dining room with a bruising grip on both his arms, dragged him with a squeak of his Oxfords on the white quartz floor before anyone in the dining room could even so much as glimpse him through the cracked doors—stopped him to fix his hair and his collar and his sleeves and give him a scathing glance for the scrapes on his knuckles, his fingertips.

        “You’re not a mechanic,” he muttered, not because he believed it but because he wanted to prepare him for what his father would inevitably say, “you’re a patrician’s son. Stop playing engineer.”

        With a gentle shove, he pushed him into the formal dining room so his father could show him off as his perfect, well-bred, relatively unmodified son.

        “Ethan?”

        He fell asleep in the greenhouse garden again, under the skylights and the wide smooth cover of imported hybrid alocasia leaves. His mother waited on the balcony above, mouth tight, eyes distant. He saw her through a cluster of bright crane flowers. “Your music teacher’s been waiting for an hour,” she said, voice echoing around the garden. “That’s almost as embarrassing as your ranting and raving about Navigation training at the Rolands’ dinner the other night.”

        “Ethan!”

        He learned from his mother how to hold a grim, narrowed-eyes stare, and he practiced when his father was lecturing him. About his humiliatingly tousled appearance, about his negligence in social impressions and causing gossip amongst his parents’ close circles, about his dream of navigating for the Alliance. He learned to recede into himself, trembling violently inside with unbroken spirit, like a wolf without teeth caught and caged.

        “This is my son, Ethan. Of course we’ve had him in the Alliance Academy of Jurisprudence—he’s second in his class for Latin _and_ philosophy. Don’t let his wrinkled shirt fool you, he’ll take my spot in office once you pry me away from it. Isn’t that right, Ethan? He’s read all three volumes of the Encyclopaedia Politica and give him page reminders, he can formulate rather strong polemics. Ethan, play something for our guests. Not Chopin, it’s so depressing and archaic.”

        He just wanted to be heard and seen. A wolf with teeth. He didn’t want to be perfect; he wanted to be free. He wanted to be good enough for someone to be proud of him, at least believe in him.

        But more than anything, he wanted to be _real_.

* * *

_Thirty-seven hours from Colteron territory, Battleship Sleipnir._

“I’ve been thinking,” Abel says.

        Cain nods.

        “And I’ve kind of made up my mind, so don’t try to change it.”

        Cain slides his eyes over to the other side of the cot pallets, where the low light of the room casts Abel in milky shades of artificial moonlight—leaves him looking pale and soft, sleeve of a standard issue muscle tank slipping farther to one shoulder than the other. He tenses when Cain meets his stare, though it’s obvious he’s been waiting for as much—gaze fixed, unyielding but still somehow unsure. Something brewing behind those dark eyes.

        “What?” Cain cuts through the brittle pause, raising his brows.

        Abel shrugs, heaves a sigh, shifts around under his blanket a little. Cain fights the twitch of a pleased smirk. He loves getting Abel all flustered—whether it is blushing or frustrated doesn’t matter.

        Abel sits up on his elbow, frowning down at him. “I want to mark you, too.”

        What is not quite as fun is Abel getting _him_ flustered.

        Cain mirrors him, popping up to one elbow and pinning him with a look of mixed confusion—brow knotted, lip curled. “What?” he echoes, far less impatiently this time.

        Abel shrugs again, eyes skittish at first. Cain knows that pinch of his face; it is usually accompanied by a hot blush or at the very least clammy palms. Finally Abel’s eyes catch focus again, and boldly.

        “I want to mark you like you marked me.”

        A kneejerk sort of feeling snaps inside Cain like a whip. He isn’t sure what it is. He isn’t sure he wants to articulate it because it feels something sort of like feelings tearing at the stronghold of pretenses he thought were more deeply engrained. Throb of the heart, surge of vicious adrenaline sending the taste of metal to his teeth. He sits up roughly, uttering a harsh laugh. Throws his eyes all around the dark room like he might find the words anywhere in it. “Well,” he says, “look at you, you kinky little brat—I created a monster, didn’t I? Released all that sexual frustration and ‘I’m so innocent’ and now you just can’t get enough, huh?”

        Abel scoffs, propping his face in his hand. “Hey, I never said I was _innocent_ , I was just inexperienced—”  

        “The pupil always kills the mentor.”

        “What the fuck are you talking about?”

        “It’s in all the movies.”

        “Wait,” Abel sputters, scowling in that irritatingly pretentious way of his that has never broken even under Cain’s worst tantrums, “you found it perfectly okay to fuck up my face the first hour we met but now that we’ve been working together for months, you won’t let me do it to you? I thought you were into all that.”

        “I am.” Cain flashes Abel a dark frown over his shoulder and it feels shamefully more like a pout. But it was _different_ before. At the start it had been simple—Bering’s plan, and Abel’s obvious vulnerability, his loneliness, the uptight goody-two-shoes shtick that just screamed for rough, therapeutic sex had been the perfect place to start getting Abel to trust him. Granted, there was a level of alpha male reputation-fluffing involved, but that had just been the added bonus of a guy like him in Bering’s game of chess. He’d needed to get Abel afraid enough of him to be indebted and dependent on him. Simple.

        But God, he is helpless to how complicated it has become. Abel challenges him. Abel softens him. Abel is not afraid of him and that threw Cain completely off.

        Of course he cannot say any of that. So glumly he argues, “I didn’t fuck up your face, that’s a beautiful scar.”

        Below a defeated huff of a sigh, Abel mutters, “Oh my God.” He rolls his eyes and flops back to his pillow. It’s his way of flirting. Cain smiles faintly.

        For a moment there is just the hum of the ship, the ring of it in the ears. Distant clanking of overnight work, faraway voices of someone down the hall.

        “Do you feel bad for it?” Abel murmurs. “Now that we actually know each other?”

        “We don’t know each other,” Cain snorts, which is sort of a lie and sort of not a lie and a lot more about how he doesn’t know how Abel can be the first one to look at him like he’s not a monster.

        “I wasn’t unwilling, you know,” Abel insists, stubbornly, but tentatively, like he’s feeling around for Cain’s breaking point. It is Cain’s turn to roll his eyes. He hates when Abel does this—goes all therapist on him, picking a suspected qualm and trying to Freud through it. Obviously tonight he’s decided that Cain feels guilty for the first part of their assigned partnership so he won’t talk about it, ever.

        Which might be true. But Cain just doesn’t really know how to explain it. Sex. Force. Violence. Territorialism. Desperation. It’s just how things are—the way the world works—at least the world he knows, and he really wishes Abel would stop trying to reconcile it with his own since he’s already successfully fucked up everything Cain had gotten used to.    

        Abel sighs. “I get it if you think it’ll ruin your image. Just say so if it is. Are you surprised? Am I the first one to ask—”

        “I’ve only done it to you,” Cain snaps, uncoiling fingers he didn’t realize he’d fisted into the blankets.

        Abel shuts up fast. Cain doesn’t look at him yet, but he can practically feel the look of shock and satisfaction on Abel’s face. “I don’t get it,” Abel says, knee bumping Cain’s thigh under the blankets. “You said you were claiming me. You said you wanted everyone to know I was yours.”

        _Yes. Because you had to be mine for the fucking plan. Because—_

        Cain shifts a little, meeting Abel’s brooding stare without lifting his head. His eyes burn into him, scorch right to his very bone. Fuck if it doesn’t turn him on the most defenseless way, a way he never expects no matter how much it happens now. Like when Abel’s smile lights the room or the anger in his eyes and bitten-down mouth leave Cain tense and neurotic. Like when Abel’s really horny and plays eye games, head games, taunts Cain until Cain can’t think straight anymore. Like when Abel hums to himself on accident sometimes, laughs sheepishly and says, “I never thought I’d miss playing the piano, but I do, and my mother would be happy about that, I guess.”

        Something in Abel’s face changes. He sits all the way up, too, eyes sharpening like he sees something Cain doesn’t.

        “Unless someone else already marked you,” he suggests finally, voice flat but soft.

        Cain’s jaw tightens.

        “Cain,” Abel says, coolly and firmly. “Tell me.”

* * *

_Colony_ _No_ _._ _Five_ _, “Нов-советских поселение_.”

The atmosphere was almost too inhospitable for Alliance bio-mod plants—almost. Their best industry struggled to keep the cold and the winds out of the biosphere, but it was a stormy place, no higher than sixty-five degrees in the acclimated summer, and pieces of the bio-mod plant were always breaking or freezing and so many men had been killed or hurt in work accidents that Colonial Directors were forced to sign big checks, which of course left everyone else wondering where their New Year’s bonus was.

        The colony was abandoned. Not empty, no—but forgotten. The cost-benefit numbers forced the Alliance to reconsider No. Five enough to put it on the back burner, just not enough to admit No. Five had been a rash decision. Neo-Sovietskikh Settlement, cramped, hurried apartment complexes and crooked factories between the administrative block and the distant quartz mines.

        “He’s a sputnik,” Vasily Davidovich said and the others in the bar echoed with growly laughter, blowing smoke in his face and waving him to refill their whiskeys. “His mom worked at Grisha’s place—Arkady, you fucked her? I fucked her, too! This place is infested with sputniks, eh?”

        _Sputnik_. A satellite. In bar slang and street talk, it meant an orphan, usually a bastard. Someone who had nowhere to belong, who clung to someone like a moon to a planet, revolving, serving, running errands or cleaning houses or whatever else for some money or a warm place to sleep at night.

        What irritated him was how they’d called him a sputnik before his mom died and a sputnik after his mom died, too. That was just belittling.

        “Sasha,” she’d said once, running her fingers through his hair and tickling his earlobes with her nice nails, “don’t you dare do what I do.”

        He could have, but he didn’t. He sputniked his way into one of No. Five’s most violent gangs on accident. They didn’t care how much time he spent in the dollar movie theater, where they showed films about Earth. They called him little brother and _kadet_. They ruffled his hair, fed him vodka, stuffed him with hot food, stole him clothes, taught him to sleep with a lady, to shoot a gun, to use a knife, to kill a man with two punches. They liked to ask other gangs to bet money on him and everyone cheered _Aleksandr Nikolayevich!_ when he took out a man twice his size and bounced, waiting, shaking off bloody knuckles, swiping at a busted lip.

        _S novyy godom! S novyy godom!_

        New Year’s. They said whatever you’re doing the moment the clock strikes twelve, midnight, foreshadows the rest of the new year.

        “ _S novyy godom_ ,” Mitya husked, breath hot on his neck, hot on the cool trickle of blood creeping down from behind his ear. His chest was tight, body stiff. His hooded parka drooped off his shoulders and he tasted his own blood on Mitya’s kiss.

        “You’re mine, you get that, Sasha? You belong to me and now everyone will know it.”

        He didn’t give a fuck as long as he had something to drink, something to smoke, somewhere to sleep. He half-fell, half-shuffled back against the wall at the shove of Mitya’s hand. He was trapped, a wolf without teeth. He lit a cigarette in the back room of the bar and tipped his head away for Mitya’s mouth to run down the length of his throat. The bartender’s favorite handmade grandfather clock (which everyone else in the bar despised) started the twelve-studded chiming for midnight and all the bar roared and cheered for the new year.

        _Da, ya ponimayu_.

        “One day you’ll do this to someone, too—” Mitya purred.

        “No,” he said, wiping blood from his neck with a sweater sleeve. “I won’t have to, unlike you.”

* * *

_Thirty-seven hours from Colteron territory, Battleship Sleipnir._

Abel has learned by now that sometimes Cain uses his hands—his tongue—his teeth—jumps his bones because he doesn’t want to talk about something or because he doesn’t have the words to talk about something.

        Tonight, it feels like both of those things at once. But Cain’s body talks to Abel’s body in a way Cain’s tongue won’t, and Abel understands the ancient language perfectly. In fact, sometimes he feels like he can speak it, too. 

        “Tell me,” Abel said. “Who was it? Is that where you learned it?”

        “It’s just behind my ear,” Cain grumbled back.

        There is something dangerously raw and heated in Cain’s stare, something like the way he looked at him the first time he let Abel inside him. Yes, that’s what it is—it’s the same way. He wants Abel inside him. Not _that_ , but—he is letting Abel inside whatever dark, stormy place hides behind his lightning eyes. He grabs him by the ankle and Abel yields completely, lets Cain pull him closer and crush him to the blankets with a bruising kiss.

        He arches his back, opens his mouth for tongue. Cain grinds down into him; Abel rolls his hips back, already throbbing to attention. God, all of this is fucked up and he craves it. Shivers ripple down between his hips, harden, burn. Cain wrestles Abel’s shorts off and his mouth closes on his dick and Abel tightens his fingers in Cain’s hair as desperate pleasure knots his brow. His chest aches in the best way, raw and hopeful—he is galvanized, he is smitten, he is senselessly willing, the way a little bit of stubble under Cain’s chin scratches sensitive flesh is titillating.

        He has no idea who he is anymore but he loves who the scar has made him.

        Cain clutches Abel at the hips hard enough to leave bruises like fingerprints, rolls over with the momentum to drag Abel with him ho-hum, no separation. Abel has become so obsessed with the way it feels when Cain’s body invades his body, the way Cain drinks in his cracking moans like he is dying of thirst. The smell of him leaves Abel dizzy—warm skin, sweet hair, familiar breath. He plants his hands on Cain’s chest and grinds down until he’s sure Cain’s cock could bruise his tailbone from the inside out.

        But Cain swats him away, wrestles out of his own shirt and pulls Abel’s hands by the wrists to his naked chest.

        “Mark me, too,” he growls through his teeth, eyes flashing. “You want to get all meaningful about this? Prove it. Prove you want this—”

        Stare wide and wild, Abel chokes on a breath, heart giving a little jolt that even throbs faintly on the heat of Cain inside him. “I can’t,” he moans, regretfully.

        “You fucking _asked_ to,” Cain whines.                

        Abel can feel his heart under his fingertips. Maybe it's his own heart pounding in his fingertips. He feels so ridiculous; biting is not an off the wall fetish. “I know, but I don’t think I could bite you that hard, I don’t want to hurt you—”

        “I can handle it,” Cain snorts. “Do it. Claim me.”

        He wants to ask how Cain expects him to accomplish that while his hips are so passionately and steadily driving up, up, up into him. Fever-hot flustered and nervous, moans stuttering out between kisses, Abel clutches him by the hard, cut shoulders and grazes his teeth over the gentle rise at the top of a pectoral. Crumpled forward like this traps his dick between Cain’s abdomen and his own belly button and the friction is _torturously_ distracting—

        He gnaws and sucks at Cain’s chest until Cain stops moaning, laughs in that goofy way that always catches Abel off guard, cries, “Use your fucking incisor, idiot!”

        Everything is sticky and wet like when Cain forgets to warn him before coming in his mouth—Abel bites and bites until he doesn’t know how hard he’s biting anymore, he feels like an animal but it seems right with the way they’re tangled together, the way they’re moving together, the way sex always strips him down to the rawest, purest form of himself, charged with manic need—

        Something gives way under his teeth like biting into a too-ripe peach and he tastes metal.

        Cain rattles out a ragged, “ _Fuck!_ ” but it sounds relieved. Abel knows the twitch of his body at the snap of orgasm and a little bit of blood smears sticky across his cheek as Cain’s body moves, he’s coming hard, piston hips sending shockwaves of delighted shivers up Abel’s spine.

        Sticky, everything sticky and hot and sore. He hiccups on a breath. His head spins. He can’t decide whether he feels horrible or feels triumphant. He just bit someone hard enough to draw blood—he just bit _Cain_ —

        Cain finishes him with his hand and tonight is one of those times he comes so hard, there are tears.

        The room smells like sex—rich, heady, sweet.

        “Don’t touch me yet,” Abel whispers, voice shaking about as much as his hands as he tries to catch his breath again. Cain looks concerned, hovering over him now that they’re no longer joined at the hips. Abel shakes his head, waves his hands apologetically, rocks his body side to side a little as the last of the climax comedown drains away. Finally, he can breathe again. A numb exhaustion washes through him, tingles in his fingertips. 

        Cain pants slowly, lying beside him.

        Abel rolls over, presses his nose into Cain’s shoulder and tries to find this branding from his past, behind his ear.

        “It’s almost faded,” he whispers reassuringly, dark hair tickling him as he pulls away from kissing the scar just between Cain’s jawline and pierced ear.

        Abel gets it. He does, really. It’s like a rite of passage, a cycle.

        He runs his knuckles over his own scar, mouth pressed into a thin line. He can hardly remember how bruised his lip was after Cain bit it that first night, back from Commander Cook’s office. What he does remember is the immediate tension crackling between them, the way his hair stood on end from his arms to his neck to his back when Cain started kissing him. He remembers thinking how fucking awful it was for someone so fascinatingly attractive to be so rough and cruel and he remembers feeling ashamed of himself for wanting it _so badly_ from a complete stranger—anyone, anyone who would give it to him, make him feel real.

        Sometimes he worries he’s using Cain.

        But then he thinks about Cain sleeping with his arm around his waist, heartbeat lulling him to sleep through his spine—the way he pouts when Abel catches sight of bandages on his knuckles, his middle, his arms—laughing like a kid, head cocked back, slapping his knee—focusing on something, body rigid, eyes narrowed—idly massaging the back of Abel’s neck like he is now, falling asleep after sex, or in the morning when Abel is two cups of coffee from being fully awake. 

        The flaking smudge of rust-red down across Cain’s nipple makes him want to cringe. At least the mark itself is mostly scabbed now. It’ll be bouqueted by a huge bruise in the morning. And Cain will probably pick at it until the scar is so deep, it turns white.

        “You’re mine,” Abel whispers, circling the bite mark with a lazy finger and still somewhat appalled at himself for being capable of such a thing.

        Cain is halfway to his usual kitten snores but he stirs awake enough to reply, “You didn’t have to mark me for that, babe.”

* * *

END [1/1].

**Author's Note:**

>  **Нов-советских поселение:** made-up real russian, 'neo-soviet colony'  
>  **S novyy godom:** russian, с новый годом, 'happy new year'  
>  **Da, ya ponimayu:** russian, да, я понимаю, 'yeah, i get it/i understand'
> 
> please look up quartz floors, they're luxurious as sin
> 
> // @shinraifaith’s brilliant little rp idea, of monsters and men wolves without teeth, exploration of headcanons – i’ve always felt really apprehensive about writing starfighter fic bc @hamletmachine satisfies everything for me, really she’s gd brilliant, but – here it is and please forgive me, it always takes a fic or two to really get the hang of things


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